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Flash Flooding: A Burkean Analysis of Culture and Community in the Flash Mob

Rebecca Walker, Southern Illinois University

Abstract

In 2003, writer and
cultural critic Bill Wasik stunned the world with his newest
experiment, the MOB Project, which flooded the streets of New York City
with strange performances quickly labeled “flash mobs” by
participants and local media. With the goal of understanding the
communicative purpose and function of these new performance events,
this project analyzes the eight original flash mobs of 2003 through the
use of Kenneth Burke’s Pentad. Specifically, this essay explores
the agent, agency, and scene of the flash mob, arguing that the scene
was the dominant pentadic feature of Wasik’s act (the Flash Mob).
Additionally, this paper examines the specific social, cultural and
political influences of the flash mob and its participants with a
particular emphasis on technology and the hipster subculture.

Skene1

Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 21:45:21 -0700 (PDT)
From: The Mob Project
To: themobproject@yahoo.com
Subject: MOB #3
(Apologies to those who received an incomplete version before.)
You are invited to take part in MOB, the project that creates an
inexplicable mob of people in New York City for ten minutes or less.
Please forward this to other people you know who might like to join.
FAQ
Q. For a mob to be inexplicable, does it need to take place in an
otherwise empty space?
A. No.
(Savage)

A Scene

Fred has a nice action shot of MOBsters applauding. Notice the smiles.
You couldn’t help smiling; it was gorgeous (Ginger).

The Scene

3 July 2003
I just returned from Flashmob #3. This was called “The Grand
Central Mob Ballet,” and was supposed to involve claiming to be waiting for a train, and writing
the word “MOB” on a one dollar bill, but none of that came into play. Instead, we got
a form saying:

*** MOB #3 ***Change of Plans
If you are reading this, we have decided to change venues.

By 7:02, walk out to 42nd St. and look for the main entrance to the
Grand Hyatt.

Enter and take the escalator up one flight to the main lobby. Loiter
until 7:07.

At 7:07, start taking the escalator and elevators up one floor, to
the wraparound railing overlooking the lobby. Stand around it, looking
down. Fan out to cover as much of the railing as possible. If asked why
you are there, point down to the lobby and say, “Look.”

At 7:12, begin applauding. Applaud for fifteen seconds, then
disperse in an orderly fashion (Note: the exit on that floor is
not a pedestrian exit.).(Danzig)

Seen:

Figure 1. Man, Myth, Morland. 2 July 2003. Web. 12 July 2010.

Figure 2. Man, Myth, Morland. 2 July 2003.Web. 12 July 2010.

Figure 3. Man, Myth, Morland. 2 July 2003. Web. 12 July 2010.

Figure 4. Satan’s Laundromat. 2 July 2003. Web. 12 July 2010.

Introduction

Consider, for a moment, Figures 1 and 3. Figure 1 depicts multiple
flashmobbers gathered against the hotel railing, gazing down upon the
lobby, as instructed. Many, although not all, appear to be with friends
or loved ones, evidenced by arms around shoulders and other close, open
body language. In the hallway, a singular individual in a suit walks
by, casting what one can only assume to be a bewildered sideways glance
at the flashmobbers lining the balcony. Perhaps this individual wonders
at what they are all staring. According to Figures 2 and 4, which
depict the empty atrium lobby below, they were an audience for nothing.
Now look at Figure 3: Two individuals—perhaps friends, perhaps
strangers—stare down into the lobby like all the other
flashmobbers. However, the angle from which this photo is shot
intrigues: the photographer of Figure 3 seems interested in capturing
at least two things: first, the similarity of the two individuals in
the forefront, whose skin color may differ, but whose clothing and body
positions seem to almost mirror one another; and second, the picture of
what falls in these individuals’ direct line of sight—other
flashmobbers on the opposite side of the balcony, engaged in the exact
same activity (staring down into the empty lobby below). In a sense,
these flashmobbers at the far opposite end of the atrium balcony serve
as another reflection, or mirror, of the two in the forefront. One
begins to realize, or merely infer, that this flash mob—maybe
even all of flash mob creator Bill Wasik’s original eight
mobs—are not simply about the absurdity of the act, but also the
communal nature of the action. Wasik himself supports such a claim, in
his description of Mob #3, depicted above:

Then, all at once, we rode the elevators and escalators up to the
mezzanine and wordlessly lined the banister. The handful of hotel
guests were still there, alone again, except now they were confronted
with a hundreds-strong armada of hipsters overhead, arrayed shoulder to
shoulder, staring silently down. But intimidation was not the point; we
were staring down at where we had just been, and also
across at one another, two hundred artist-spectators commandeering an
atrium on Forty-second Street as a coliseum—style theater of
self-regard. After five minutes of staring, the ring erupted into
precisely fifteen seconds of tumultuous applause—for
itself—after which it scattered back downstairs and out the door,
just as the police cruisers were rolling up, flashers on. (58)

Three of Wasik’s comments in this account stand out as
strikingly important, and heretofore unexamined. First, Wasik takes
care to point out one unifying characteristic of the
flashmobbers—their shared status as members of the hipster
subculture. Second, Wasik specifically mentions the scenic or spatial
element of this particular mob, whose goal was to
“commandeer” a space in two different ways. In so doing, he
highlights the different nature of this mob from most, if not all, of
the other seven, as a non-verbal performance event. Mob #3 was physical
in nature—its directive being to move bodies around in a space
and have those bodies engage in a shared act, applause, before
dispersing out of the space. Finally, Wasik’s use of language
points toward the communal or community-building nature of this mob.
Wasik’s mob participants look across “at one another”
and his mob applauds “itself,” acknowledging the
“we” of community created in the act of participation.

As products of the digital age, flash mobs require a certain level of
technological advancement to form, namely e-mail and text message
technology created in the latter part of the 20th century. Every flash
mob begins with an e-mail (often from an anonymous account or organizer
using a pseudonym) announcing the date and time of occurrence, along
with either a set of instructions for action or the promise of
instructions to be delivered on site. Recipients then forward this
e-mail to others in cyberspace through computers and cell phones,
forming the mob (or at least its virtual potential) with each
successive email or text message. Usually, upon arrival, participants
are given instructions on fliers detailing what they should do during
the flash mob. As a rule, flash mobs tend to last no longer than ten
minutes (Wasik 66). Participants arrive at a site,
perform their action(s), and then leave, often just before the police
arrive. These actions range from shopping en masse for a rug, to
pointing at a fast food menu and mooing like cows, to pretending to
stand in line for Strokes tickets (Johnson, Wasik). This article uses
Burke’s Pentad to examine the scene, agent, and agency of the
eight original flash mobs organized by Bill Wasik in 2003, ultimately
arguing that the scene served as the dominant factor for determining
the agent and agency of Wasik’s act (the flash mob). However,
before I begin this examination, a more brief description of these
eight mobs, ending with a detailed depiction of Mob #3, offers the
reader a shared point of departure.

Bill Wasik, cultural critic and Harper’s Magazine
editor, produced eight flash mobs that acted upon the streets of New
York City in the summer of 2003. The first, an utter failure, occurred
on June 3, 2003, at the site of a Claire’s Accessories store in
the East Village’s Astor Place. Mobsters were instructed to
gather inside the store and on the street at 7:24 p.m., at which time
those outside the store would point at those inside and chant
“Acessories!” until the mob dissipated at 7:31 p.m.
However, as stated earlier, the mob failed because one of the
individuals receiving an e-mail invitation informed the police of its
occurrence. When potential members of the flash mob arrived upon the
scene, they found six police officers and a police truck blocking their
entrance to the store.

Wasik remedied this problem by only disseminating a spot at which to
gather and receive further instructions for his subsequent mobs,
thereby preventing any potential participants from alerting the police
as to their actions or site. Mob #2 occurred a few weeks later on June
17, when a few hundred people gathered in Macy’s rug department
to shop for a “love rug” for their supposed commune in Long
Island City. After a few minutes of shopping, the mob abruptly left the
store. Mob #3, described below, took place in early July at the Grand
Hyatt Hotel, where mobbers lined the atrium balcony, stared at each
other, and then burst into spontaneous applause before quickly leaving
the site.

Wasik’s fourth mob took place on July 16, 2003, at Otto Tootsi
Plohound, an expensive shoe store. Participants gathered to pretend
they were tourists from Maryland, proceeding to examine and appreciate
the store’s expensive footwear as if the shoes were relics from
another universe. Mob #5 followed, where participants gathered along a
ridge in Central Park West and made a variety of natural and ironic
bird calls before leaving. Often the most discussed of Wasik’s
eight mobs, Mob #6 occurred at the Toys ‘R Us in Times Square on
August 7th, 2003, when participants gathered to cower in false
capitulation before the store’s animatronic Tyrannosaurus Rex,
leaving just as police arrived.

Wasik’s last two mobs took place outdoors, with Mob #7 occurring
on the sidewalk outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where
participants lined up single file, informing anyone who asked that they
were waiting for tickets to a concert by The Strokes, a popular hipster
band. Wasik’s final mob took place in an alcove on Forty-Second
Street, where mobsters gathered to await instructions from “the
performer.” The performer turned out to be a portable radio, or
boom box. However, the mob was so large and unruly that they failed to
hear the performer’s instruction. When a participant (later
discovered to be a local performance artist) opened his briefcase to
reveal a neon sign reading “Café Thou Art” and then
proceeded to hold up two fingers of his right hand, participants
believed this man to be “the performer” and began chanting
“Peace!” over and over for about a minute before dispersing.

When viewed within the larger context of all eight mobs, Mob #3 gains
added significance as the last of Wasik’s highly self-reflexive
first three mobs. Mobs 1–3 focus largely on the mobbers
themselves—they are the accessories (Mob 1), they are a commune
(Mob 2), they applaud themselves (Mob 3). After Mob #3, Wasik’s
mob project turns toward the other, if only in jest. The performers
play with tourists (Mob 4), nature (Mob 5), religion (Mob 6), and
culture (Mob 7). Wasik’s final mob shifts the game completely by
telling his performers, the flashmobbers, to simply serve as an
“enthusiastic audience” for a sidewalk performer (Bemis).
The move from self to other seems more than coincidence. I believe
Wasik used his first three mobs to create a scene, and in so doing,
created a community, a powerful “we” whose influence and
membership expands to this very day.

Crucial to the creation of Wasik’s scene was the socio-cultural
and historic climates of New York City in a post-9/11 era, as well as
the spatial layout of the city itself. These material and philosophical
realities created the environment, or scene, where Wasik’s acts
took place. Drawing upon Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic theory, I
argue that the scenic element—more than anything
else—allowed for the act (the creation of Wasik’s flash
mobs) to occur. In addition, two other heretofore unexamined
elements—Wasik’s agents, the hipster subculture, and his
primary agency, cellular phone technology—function as tangential,
necessary elements in the more dominant scene. I first examine these
secondary components and ultimately end with an extensive discussion of
scene and its relationship to culture and community in the flash mob.

Agent

Noted literary critic, philosopher, and rhetorician
Kenneth Burke expanded the fields of contemporary rhetoric and
performance studies exponentially through his Pentad, created as a
method for divining rhetorical motives out of literary dramas.
According to Burke, in order to understand motives, one must begin by
identifying and examining the five elements (or questions) of his
Pentad: “what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene),
who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose)”
(xv). Contemporary rhetoricians use Burke to examine not only literary
dramas, but also those occurring in politics, media, and society.
Performance teachers often use Burke in their introductory classes as a
way to teach students how to examine and perform literature. Taking
cues from both, I expand and apply Burke’s Pentad to the flash
mob, a contemporary performance event, to identify the flash
mob’s components and examine the relationship between them.

In simplest terms, the agents of the eight original flash mobs in
this study are New York City hipsters of 2003. Although one might argue
Wasik, as originator of the idea of the flash mob and sender of the
invitational e-mails, is the primary agent of the flash mob, he places
himself within the larger group of actors by retaining his anonymity
and e-mailing his original and subsequent invitations not only to his
friends, but also to himself.2 As such, anyone who shows up
and takes part in one of these flash mobs becomes an agent of the act.
Before examining the particular makeup of the New York hipster of 2003,
further elaboration on Burke’s theory of the Pentad is necessary.

Identifying the five elements of the Pentad in regard to a
particular act is the first step in determining its motives. The
second, and ultimately more important, step examines the relationship
between each of the parts. Burke labels this relationship their ratios
or “principles of determination” (15). In other words,
Burke highlights the intermingling between elements, those points where
one part of the Pentad merges with or strongly differentiates itself
from another. Within these ratios, Burke locates the dramatic tensions
that reveal the motivations behind particular rhetorical strategies.
Burke identifies and discusses ten possible ratios arising from his
Pentad; I focus on two: scene-agent and scene-agency. These two ratios,
unlike the other seven, directly address the subjects of this essay:
the scene, agent, and agency of Wasik’s flash mobs, as well as
the dominant relationship existing between them.

Burke describes the scene-agent ratio as a “synecdochic
relation . . . between person and place” (7) or perhaps more
simply as the “container and thing contained” (3). The
container referred to here is the scene and the agent the thing
contained. Burke provides literary examples for this ratio; however, as
I am expanding Burke’s analysis outside of the literary realm
into contemporary culture, I suggest a more apt example from the days
following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The scene left by Katrina was one
of utter devastation and destruction for the residents of both New
Orleans and south Louisiana. Although many agents engaged in various
acts, the entire nation looked toward one agent in
particular—President George W. Bush. The scene of Katrina called
for a response of urgency on the part of the President, the expression
of concern, perhaps even a disheveled physical appearance as evidence
of long nights spent working on solutions to such devastation. As such,
the scene controls, or dictates, the requirements of its agent and act.
President Bush’s initial act—the flyover of the area days
after the hurricane—inspired outrage among residents because it
appeared more the act of a curious tourist than that of a concerned
President. In other words, the agent did not suit the scene.

I argue that the agents of the original eight flash mobs do suit
the scene. Modern hipster subculture emerges out of a distinct and
particular socio-cultural and historical scene, which I discuss in the
final section of this paper. Furthermore, Wasik states that the entire
impetus for flash mobs came out of his and his friends’ own
fascination with being a part of “the scene”:
seeing how all culture in New York was demonstrably commingled with scenesterism,
the appeal of concerts and plays and readings and gallery shows
deriving less from the work itself than from the social opportunities
the work might engender, it should theoretically be possible to create
an art project consisting of pure scene—meaning the
scene would be the entire point of the work, and indeed would itself
constitute the work. (58)

In short, the very essence of the modern hipster lies in her
association with and participation in the scene. However, before I
address the scene-agent ratio in the flash mob fully, let me return to
the question of the modern hipster: who is she, and how does she differ
from other historical “hipsters”?

The term hip most often connotes youth culture and the materials
associated with it (e.g., the new, often wacky clothes, music, and
books that the youth of America deem fashionable at any given moment). New
York Times reporter John Leland’s recent Hip: The
History explains the connection between youth and hip, arguing
that “hip is a culture of the young because they have the least
investment in the status quo” (22). Hip, then, is often something
new or different from the everyday. But where did hip come from? While
acknowledging the cultural influences of the European avant-garde,
Leland locates hip in the Americas, emanating along with the African
slave trade. In his opinion, hip originates out of the exchange of
African and European cultures on the plantation, with each group taking
bits of the other’s culture and accumulating (and often
refashioning) those bits into their own. For Leland, hip originates in
America, particularly in the acquisition of African culture, without
which he argues, “there is no hip” (18).

Following Leland, one’s hipness appears rooted in their
knowledge of African-American culture. The term hip itself is often
attributed to be a derivative of the African word hipi, which
loosely translates as “to open one’s eyes” (Fletcher).3
Our modern understanding of hip and hipsters, however, arises out of
the jazz and art scene of America in the 1930s and ’40s. Jazz, a
uniquely American musical blend of African and European styles,
produced a unique subculture among its largely black musicians, one
which middle-class white youths found fascinating and ultimately sought
to emulate. Shortly after World War II, rising young authors such as
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg sang the praises of the burgeoning
hip/jazz scene in their novels and poems, becoming the faces of hipster
culture. Norman Mailer, American playwright and novelist, sought to
define the movement and its members, famously referring to them in his
essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the
Hipster.”

Mailer’s essay extends the notion of hip beyond an adoption
of black culture by highlighting the existential nature of the youth
within the subculture. According to Mailer, young people strongly
affected by both fear of the atomic bomb and loathing of conformity in
middle America sought escape (and possibly rebellion) through their
association with jazz and black America as well as their idealism of
vagabond travelers such as Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty. A similar
desire to escape the middle class and associate the self with the other
or the unknown is evident in both the hippie and punk subcultures of
the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

However, the hipsters who chase hip are more than just vanguard
thinkers and lovers of difference; they are also trendsetters. Hip
perseveres because hip sells itself to the mainstream. In Hip: The
History, Leland writes “where religion creates workers, hip
creates consumers” (342). Hip is not simply a fascination with
the dark other, or a reaction to the time in which one lives; it is a
product to be sold. For Wasik’s New York hipsters of 2003, hip
certainly involved all three.

Wasik’s hipster, or the modern hipster, is almost always
defined by her appearance. Some writers focus on the hipsters’
physical appearance, describing them as “fashion-conscious
twentysomethings hanging about and sporting a number of predictable
stylistic trademarks: skinny jeans, cotton spandex leggings, fixed-gear
bikes, vintage flannel, fake eyeglasses and a keffiyeh” (Haddow).
Other journalists focus their depictions on the hipster’s
psychological stance, arguing that “everything about them is
exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don’t
care” (Fletcher). Some take these psychological descriptions a
step further creating categories of hipster psychosis: “We know
that there are Sweet hipsters, who practice the sort of irony you can
take home to meet the parents, and there are those Vicious hipsters,
who practice the form of not—quite-passive aggression called
snark” (Lorentzen).
Critics often deride the modern hipster’s ironic stance and
particular fashion sense as empty trademarks pointing towards a hollow
society, or as some say, “the dead end of Western
civilization” (Fletcher). Such remarks usually stem from the
modern hipster’s fashion sense, one that, according to columnists
like Christian Lorentzen, “fetishizes the authentic and
regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity.” In this
reiterated fashion, the modern hipster, although a definite product of
her time (both historically and capitally), distinguishes herself from
her predecessors. Whereas 20th century hipsters borrowed from
contemporaneous aspects of the other’s culture—such as
jazz—to create their fashion, or simply created their
own—as in punk—the 21st century hipster recycles the
fashion of their predecessors.

Some of these reclamations appear to serve as acts of
identification, others as desperate attempts to collage a new identity
out of an older, more established one. An example of the former
appropriation is the keffiyeh—a scarf originally worn by Jewish
students and Western protestors as a symbol of support for
Palestinians—now sold in a variety of colors and patterns to
teenagers at the local Target. Douglas Haddow, cultural critic,
provides further examples:

The American Apparel v-neck shirt, Pabst
Blue Ribbon beer and Parliament cigarettes are symbols and icons of
working or revolutionary classes that have been appropriated by
hipsterdom and drained of meaning. . . . such things have become
shameless clichés of individuals that seek to escape their own
wealth and privilege by immersing themselves in the aesthetic of the
working class. (1)

These appropriations differ from those of early 20th century
American teenagers wearing black turtlenecks and berets. The modern
hipster revisits the past in search of authenticity, instead of looking
around in the present for inventions of new meaning. Although one might
argue such scavenging and re-assembling serves as a form of invention,
many reporters and cultural critics view this desire to forage the past
and assemble some sort of new meaning from its symbols and trends as a
cannibalistic act:

Those 18-to-34-year-olds called hipsters
have defanged, skinned and consumed the fringe movements of the postwar
era—Beat, hippie, punk, even grunge. Hungry for more, and sick
with the anxiety of influence, they feed as well from the trough of the
uncool, turning white trash chic, and gouging the husks of long-expired
subcultures—vaudeville, burlesque, cowboys and pirates. . . .
Simlarly, they devour gay style. . . . these aesthetics are
assimilated—cannibalized—into a repertoire of
meaninglessness, from which the hipster can construct an identity in
the manner of a collage, or a shuffled playlist on an iPod. (Lorentzen)

Whether cannibalistic or inventive, the modern hipster sets herself
apart as more of a historian and collage artist than an adventurer or
explorer.

In 2009, music and entertainment magazine Paste published
a two-page photo spread portraying “The Evolution of the Hipster
2000–2009” (Kiefer). Serving as an ironic timeline of the
modern hipster’s appearance and perseverance on the cultural
scene, Paste’s evolution points out many of the modern
hipster’s recycled identifications in the names given to each
year’s hipster: The Twee, The Fauxhemian, The Mountain Man, The
Vintage Queen, The Meta-Nerd (Kiefer). Paste titles
Wasik’s hipster, the hipster of 2003, “The
Scenester,” writing “a gaudy tattoo appears on her chest,
and she is never spotted without her iPod” (Kiefer). While this
iPod is the only description in Paste’s entire
evolution that references modern technology of any sort, the title
“Scenester” excites me most. This label validates my
contention that Wasik’s hipster of 2003 emerged not only as a
product of her historical and socio-cultural scene, but also defined
herself by participation in the scene of her own hipster
subculture. Stated differently, Wasik’s hipster not only wore the
proper clothes, acquired the newest gadgets, and cultivated the proper
attitude of ironic distance and nonchalance, she desired to be a part
of something: to be seen in the scene.

In 2003, Wasik, out of a desire to comment upon the prevalence of
scenesterism within his own New York hipster subculture, created the
flash mob, and inadvertently produced the newest scene of which to be a
part. In the e-mail for Wasik’s first mob, he provides a
frequently asked questions section. He answers the first question,
“Why would I want to join an inexplicable mob?” with
evidence of the scenester nature of the mob, stating, “Tons of
other people are doing it” (Wasik 57). While this might explain
why participants took part in the first two or three of Wasik’s
mobs, it fails to provide an answer for why the mobs became so popular,
not only within the New York hipster subculture, but within youth
culture at-large. Perhaps the most important question we can ask of the
flash mob’s hipster is not why she showed up, but why she kept
coming back.

To answer such a question, I turn to the historical hip
predecessors mentioned earlier—the beats, the hippies, and the
punks. Each of these subcultures united themselves in fashion as well
as in artistic taste, much like Wasik’s hipster. However, aside
from a love of the same music, the same books, the same clothes, or the
same art, something else also united each of these
groups—participation in the scene of their particular era, a
participation that yielded a feeling of separation from the mainstream,
but togetherness with one another, a feeling Victor Turner labeled
communitas. The term refers to a feeling of shared togetherness or
communal spirit. One might achieve such a feeling by hanging out within
the scene of a particular subculture; however, one is much more likely
to experience communitas, at least according to Turner, if she engages
in communal activities. Beats traveled together, hippies protested en
masse, and punks raged as one. Modern hipsters, at least up until
Wasik’s flash mob, failed to engage in any sort of communal
activity outside of hanging out and traveling within their own
scene—attending the same concerts, gallery openings, book
signings, etc. What Wasik, unknowingly in my opinion, provided was a
communal act—the flash mob.

Turner believed in a dialectic existing between ritualized, highly
structured social forms of behavior, such as religious rites and
playful, anti-structural forms of behavior, such as festivals and
celebrations. Communitas exists within both realms of performative
behavior. In other words, one might experience communitas while holding
her hand to her heart and singing the national anthem alongside
thousands of other fans in a sports stadium as well as begging for
beads with fellow Mardi Gras revelers. With the flash mob, Wasik
inadvertently provided a feeling of communitas between strangers
engaged in a shared activity. If Wasik’s goal was to create an
art project that mocked his own community’s lack of
substance—the fact that they were “scenesters”
appearing at the same spots just to be a part of the scene, not out of
a love of the art within it—he probably did not plan on the power
of such a “scene”: its ability to bring strangers together
through shared physical activity:

You didn’t have to feel like you
were cool. . . . It got a lot of people to do something . . . just
because they thought it was a clever idea and they wanted to see what
would happen. . . . but while a Web page can give you some notion of
being part of a group, it’s very different to then find yourself
in a physical space with all those people. It’s a virtual
community made literal. Again, these weren’t people who knew each
other. It wasn’t an established group who decided to put on an
action. Whoever got the e-mail would attend, and they represented the
interconnectedness of people in a city. (Bemis 4)

Wasik’s particular choices of place for the flash mobs also
added to this communal feeling. Wasik purposefully chose small places
in which the flash mob—even if it only consisted of a hundred
people—appeared large and powerful. Furthermore, the flash mobs
contributed to a feeling of hipster communitas by creating a
performance in which hipsters highlighted their own
“otherness” through showcasing traits such as their ironic
humor and technological savvy. In sum, flash mobs were created by
hipsters, for hipsters, or as Wasik reasons, “flash mobs were
gatherings of insiders, and as such, could hardly communicate
to those who did not already belong” (64).

By emphasizing the communal nature of the flash mob, I hope to draw
attention towards the mob’s role as an influential performative
act, undertaken by agents out of both curiosity and a desire for
community. In so doing, I want to provide an alternative narrative of
the flash mob, one in which the flash mob exists as more than the fad
of a post-hip generation, a narrative which unfortunately tends to
prevail among scholars of “hip:”

The above definition and others like it relegate the flash mob to
the category of trend and the modern hipster to the realm of ironic
collage artist, assertions which are both somewhat unfair.
Wasik’s flash mobs definitely excited many as the next new thing;
however, their spread, continuation, and refashioning into new
performance styles over the following nine years speak to their power
as more than mere trend. As for the modern hipster, she may indeed be
post-hip—fractured, wandering, in search of a center. However, if
so, she is only a product of her time, a thing contained by a larger
container which she did not make. In sum, she is a product of her
scene—shaped by its structure and influenced by its technology.

Agency

At present, a
decade into the twenty-first century, one easily forgets the truly
radical nature of the mobile phone and its offspring: text messaging.
Take someone’s mobile phone away for a day, however, and she
begins to remember. Recently, I went without my mobile or
“cell” phone for two days, and after the first hour of
sheer panic, I recalled what life was like before the cell phone. I
racked my brain for the phone numbers of my friends and family, all of
which were stored in the memory of my phone, and realized I only
remembered two. I phoned these two numbers from a family member’s
archaic “land” line and realized the need to introduce
myself to the person on the other end of the line—something I
rarely do these days, as my phone’s caller identification system
usually does this for me. Finally, as I spent a whole two days without
my cell phone, anxiously wondering who had called and/or texted, I
slowly realized the power my cell phone possessed. I wondered what
Donna Haraway would think of me—a cyborg, yes, perhaps, yet also
a woman relying upon Steve Jobs’ software to act as memory bank
and personal identifier in her stead. Losing my mobile phone
highlighted how essential a part of me it had become.

Haraway’s theory of the cyborg offers an insightful view into
the relationship between humankind and the tools we create. Haraway, a
feminist philosopher and biologist, defined the cyborg in her seminal
“A Cyborg Manifesto” as “a cybernetic organism, a
hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as
a creature of fiction” (149). Haraway used her fictional and
ironic cyborg manifesto to comment on both feminist theory and the
technophobia she found arising in the latter part of the twentieth
century. Her theory provides an understanding of the relationship
between human and machine that is neither diametrically opposed nor
completely fused, but rather based in an exploration of boundaries and
borderlands. As Haraway, herself, reasons:

Cyborg imagery can help express two
crucial arguments: . . . first, the production of universal, totalizing
theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality; . . . and
second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and
technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of
technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing
the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in
communication with all of our parts. . . . Cyborg imagery can suggest a
way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies
and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language,
but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. . . . It means both building
and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space
stories. (181)

Haraway’s manifesto allows scholars to shift from an
assessment of the power relations between a woman and her machine to an
acknowledgement of the assemblage they jointly create. In Wasik’s
flash mob, such an assemblage functioned as the primary agency (or
means of production) of the act.

When Wasik’s flash mobs first appeared in 2003, most
journalists linked their appearance more to the internet than to mobile
phones, reporting that flash mobs were “arranged via Web sites
and e-mails” or the even more vague description that they
“organized anonymously through the internet” (Shmueli,
Johnson). While true, to a certain extent, such reports fail to address
the mobile nature of Wasik’s communiqué. A year earlier,
in 2002, two mobile phones appeared on the market containing a
surprising new feature—a full QWERTY keyboard—allowing for
the rapid expansion and proliferation of one of the mobile phone
companies’ pre-existing technologies: text messaging. One of
these phones, the Blackberry 5810 (labeled “Crackberry” by
many due to its addictive nature), contained an additional advantage:
the combination of Blackberry’s existing e-mail, organizer and
keyboard technologies with voice (or cell phone) capabilities. In so
doing, Blackberry created the ideal conditions for the advent of
Wasik’s flash mobs: mobile mass communication.

Communication scholar Judith Nicholson addresses this change in her
article “Flash Mobs in the Age of Mobile Connectivity.”
Nicholson argues:

Flash mobbing shaped and was shaped by a
worldwide shift in mobile phone use from private communication
characterized primarily by mobile phoning in the 1980s and 90s to more
collective uses dominated by mobile texting in the late 1990s and early
2000s. This shift was evident in a corresponding change in sentiments
and concerns regarding direct one-to-one mobile phone use versus
indirect one-to-many mobile phone use. (2)

Nicholson’s quotation acknowledges the symbiotic relationship
between the flash mob and the mobile phone, noting that each shaped the
other. Mobile phone technologies, such as texting and e-mail, allowed
for the rapid forwarding of Wasik’s initial e-mail, as his
“inexplicable mob” invitation quickly bounced from one
individual’s contact list to another’s. In turn, the advent
of Wasik’s flash mob as a pop culture phenomenon spread large
around the world showcased the possibilities for mobile mass
communication contained in new mobile phone technologies.

As scholars such as Nicholson and Howard Rheingold point out,
however, the powerful nature of mobile mass communication appeared on
the public’s radar as early as the late 1990s, due to its use in
the anti-globalization movement’s protests, most notably those of
the World Trade Organization protestors in Seattle in 1999. Rheingold
also describes the use of text-messaging and SMS (Short Message
Service) technology to organize protests calling for the resignation of
President Estrada in the Philippines in 2001. More recently, the world
not only bore witness, but also took part in the 2009 Iranian election
protests via the so-called “Twitter Revolution” by rapidly
re-tweeting the updates of Iranian protestors under attack by the
government. The mobile phone’s proliferation, along with its
portability and advanced technological capabilities, contributes to its
dominance as the preferred medium of one-to-many mass
communication—not only for activists and politicians, but also
for anyone with a regularly updated Twitter account.

Unlike the Philippine revolution and WTO protests, flash mobs (as
an elaborate inside joke enacted upon the city of New York) promote
play, and therefore stand out as one of the first cases in which mobile
phone technology and one-to-many mass communication were used to stage
a public performance without an overt political agenda. The idea of the
flash mob is nothing really new. Similarities exist between the flash
mob and similar performances created by Dadaists, Surrealists,
Situationists, Happenings artists and even the Yippies. However, the
speed and ease of the flash mob separates it from its predecessors. I
do not want to suggest some inextricable link between the flash
mob’s popularity and the rise of mobile mass communication.
Rather, like Bill Wasik, I believe the flash mob’s appeal to be
rooted more in its creation of community than in its use of technology.
As Wasik writes, “I myself believe that the technology played
only a minor role. The emails went out a week before each event, after
all; one could have passed around flyers on the street, I think, to
roughly similar effect” (58). Wasik and his flash mobbers used
modern mobile mass communication technologies not so much because they
were hip or trendy, but because they were readily available.

Kenneth Burke’s work supports the above. In Grammar of
Motives, he writes, “Pragmatist philosophies are generated
by the featuring of the term, Agency” (275). In other words, when
making a choice between one form of agency and another, agents tend to
choose that which is practical. Sending an email appeared more
practical to Wasik than passing out fliers. Forwarding that email via
their mobile phones seemed more practical for his flashmobbers than
relaying the message in person. Consequently, I argue that the agency
of the flash mob arose out of the technocultural scene in which it
occurred, one which made mobile phones the easiest and most practical
method of communication between Wasik and his attendees. Scene
dominated and contained the flash mob’s agency, mobile mass
communication, as powerfully as it contained its agent, the modern
hipster.

Scene

On September 11, 2001, two hijacked airplanes crashed into the World
Trade Center, one hijacked airplane crashed into the outer barrier of
the Pentagon, and a fourth airplane crashed on a field in Pennsylvania,
after passengers valiantly fought back against the terrorist hijackers
intent on crashing it into the White House. As the first attack on
American soil since the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, the events
of 9/11 changed America forever. For the first time in over sixty
years, Americans lived in fear of outside invaders, and of an enemy who
might strike at any moment. As a response, Congress passed the USA
PATRIOT Act in October of 2002, dramatically reducing the restrictions
placed upon law enforcement regarding the surveillance of American
citizens deemed to be terrorist suspects, as well as increasing law
enforcement officials’ ability to detain and deport suspected
terrorist immigrants. A few months earlier, in March of 2002, the
Homeland Security Advisory System emerged, as the result of a
Presidential directive. The system consisted of a color-coded scale,
used to inform Americans of the specific threat level of terrorist
attacks: severe (red), high (orange), elevated (yellow), guarded
(blue), or low (green). Each day, Americans could turn on their
televisions to their morning talk shows, or monitor radio or internet
broadcasts, to be advised of the specific threat level of terrorist
attacks, which usually lingered between yellow and orange, the elevated
or high end of the scale. The Department of Homeland Security, a new
government agency designed to combine and focus the attempts of the
FBI, CIA, and other intelligence agencies, debuted in November of 2002
as the result of the passage of the Homeland Security Act. Finally, on
March 19, 2003, President George W. Bush appeared on television to
declare war on Iraq, providing Americans with a visible and known enemy
in the heretofore vaguely-worded war on “terror” itself.
Two months later, President Bush appeared again, landing in full pilot
combat gear on an aircraft carrier full of soldiers, to announce
(somewhat prematurely) America’s mission accomplished, and
declare an end to major combat in Iraq. One month later, on June 3,
2003, Bill Wasik attempted his first flash mob at a Claire’s
accessory store in New York City’s Astor Place, a primary
shopping center and hangout spot of the hip, neo-bohemian East Village.

By aligning these events, I do not wish to assert that
Wasik’s mobs were a reaction to 9/11. Instead, I argue that
Wasik’s mobs are products of their time, reactions to a
heightened level of surveillance, a desire for community, and perhaps,
even to the President’s admonitions for Americans to get back to
normal by going shopping.4 In this section, I seek to
address both the historic and sociocultural scene described above, as
well as the physical scenes chosen by Wasik for his eight flash mobs.
In so doing, I hope to provide an understanding of the flash mob in
relation to its context, and draw attention to the fact that the scene,
or container, is often more important than the things it contains:
acts, agents, and agency.

Nicholson alludes to the effect of context upon the mob when she
queries, “Can flash mobbing . . . be considered a response to the
social and political conditions of 2003, particularly conditions that
existed in New York where the trend was started?” (11). According
to Christian Lorentzen, cultural critic and writer for Time Out
New York, the answer is yes. In his infamous “Why
the hipster must die” article, Lorentzen points to the
loss of menace among the modern hipster subculture, arguing,
“[Norman] Mailer, who traced hipster psychosis to the Holocaust
and the atom bomb, would likely point to September 11 as the event that
left hordes of twentysomethings whispering, ‘We would be
safe’” (1). For Lorentzen, the recycling of trends among
hipsters and lack of an overt agenda in the flash mob allude to the
effects of fear upon the youth of America following the events of 9/11.
Others disagree, locating the power of the flash mob within its very
existence in a post 9/11, hyper-secure society. In a 2003 article for
the Chicago Tribune, reporter Maureen Ryan quotes the words
of one particular flash mob participant: “Honestly, it seems like
a way to tweak the nose of those responsible for security, since things
have gotten so tense since Sept. 11, flash mobber Eric Longman said via
e-mail, ‘Remember, the 1st Amendment specifically protects the
right of the people to peaceably Assemble’” (1). Whether
the flash mob is a safe, sterile event created by the modern hipster
out of a desire for safe artistic play/transgression, or the slightly
more risky tantrum of a surveillance-weary youth culture, it
undoubtedly exists as a product of its historical time, specifically of
the events of 9/11. As such, the flash mob sits as a marker of its
time, a monument to the effects of 9/11 upon the consciousness of
America and its youth.

Douglas Haddow, writing for Adbusters in 2008, ends his
article entitled, “Hipster: The Dead End of Civilization”
with the following:

We are a lost generation, desperately
clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it
ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of
those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them
back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous
things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster
represents the end of Western civilization—a culture so detached
and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new. (1)

Haddow’s rant, while somewhat melodramatic, speaks to the
sociocultural scene of the flash mob. At the dawn of a new millennium,
the modern hipster finds herself the focal point of a generation trying
desperately to find itself. Amidst a terror-stricken and
surveillance-laden backdrop, she turns towards conspicuous consumption,
as so many youth before her have done. However, even here, she finds no
novelty, only recycled artifacts of older generations readily available
for ironic display. She frequents those establishments full of
like-minded and similarly dressed souls, purchasing communion through
participation in the so-called scene. Her rebellion consists of a
well-rehearsed posture of ironic distance—an ability to mock the
mainstream, as well as her own scene, instead of seeking to change it.

Wasik’s flash mob also mocks the mainstream, as well as the
hipster subculture from which it is constructed. However, the physical
nature of the mob—its ability to appear and hold dominion over an
actual space, if only for a moment—provides the modern hipster
with something new: the ability to act out. While full of
self-reflexivity and ironic commentary on its own participants, the
flash mob also acts as a form of cultural noise: the tantrum of a
childish subculture against the authoritarian structure(s) monitoring
its every move. When viewed in such a light, one begins to see the
flash mob as more than a mere prank. Instead, the flash mob appears as
a slightly subversive, and also somewhat safe, playful form of cultural
critique.

As a reminder, Wasik chose retail stores as sites for four of his
eight mobs: Claire’s Accessories, Macy’s, Otto Tootsi
Plohound, Toys “R” Us. These choices might lead the critic
to believe Wasik wanted to make some commentary on capitalist culture
in America. However, when viewed within the broader historical
timeframe, another distinct possibility appears. In his address to the
nation on September 21, 2001, President Bush took special care to ask
Americans for their “continued participation and confidence in
the American economy” (1). Although Bush’s request was
rather typical, in light of the fact that the attacks of September 11th
as well as the destruction of the World Trade Center created a slump in
both the stock market and general economic activity, the media reacted
rather strongly to his request. Headlines such as “If in doubt,
go shopping” and quotes such as “And for God’s sake
keep shopping!” flooded the newspapers and magazines, and even
led to critiques by both Barack Obama and John McCain in the 2008
Presidential election (Riddell; Pellegrini). As candidate Obama once
quipped, “Instead of a call to service, we were asked to go
shopping” (Ferguson). When read in such a light, one might argue
Wasik’s flash mobs take on the role of cultural critique.
Nicholson, when discussing the sites of Wasik’s eight mobs,
suggests “these sites were potentially made even more significant
to Americans in light of George Bush’s plea to get back to normal
living following the 9/11 attacks by going shopping” (9). Against
the backdrop of earlier generations who supported their war efforts
through rationing and volunteerism, the directive to conspicuously
consume given to the millennial generation may have felt like a slap in
the face—a dismissal of their abilities due to their
inexperience. After such dismissal, one naturally seeks to act out.

Wasik, however, offers a different perspective on his choice of
locations for the mobs. According to him, the scenes of his
inexplicable mobs served two purposes: first, to comment on the
changing nature of public space in America; and second, to
“create an illusion of superior strength” (Wasik 65).
Although in most early interviews Wasik denies the existence of any
political aim at work in the flash mob, by 2004 he admits to at least
one, the liberation of public space. In an interview with LA
Weekly, Wasik acknowledges:

The more I did them, the more I realized
the mobs actually did have a deeply political value. The nature of
public space in America today has changed. Its shopping malls, large
chain stores, that kind of thing. The presumption is that you’re
going to purchase something, but once you try to express yourself in
any other way, suddenly you’re trespassing. New York City is
blessed with a bunch of real public spaces, but at this point, if
you’re young in America, chances are you have grown up without
authentic public space. I discovered it was political to go into one of
those stores. (Bemis)

In this sense, one might argue that the sites of the flash mob, at
least to some extent, are dictated by the overarching historic and
sociocultural scene. These dictates may be obvious and apparent, such
as the shift in location from Grand Central Station to the Grand Hyatt
Hotel due to increased security threat levels mentioned earlier. Others
may be more subtle, such as the use of mass shopping in the
Macy’s and Otto Tootsi Plohound mobs to highlight the overarching
spread of corporate or retail space and the diminishing of space in
which we can freely exercise our right to assemble. I hope to explore
whether or not Wasik and his flashmobbers purposefully sought to
communicate such sentiments in future research. Regardless of intent,
Wasik’s mobs emphasized the changing nature of public space in
America, thereby contributing to the production of the larger
sociocultural scene while simultaneously existing as one of its
productions.

Necessity also contributed to Wasik’s choice of venue. In
order to create the feeling of a group of insiders—a
community—Wasik needed to make the mob feel powerful. As he takes
care to remind the reader, flash mobs “drew their energies not
from impressing outsiders or freaking them out but from showing them
utter disregard, from using the outside world as merely a terrain for
private games” (65). Although often prodded by bloggers and other
mob participants to hold mobs in more open spaces, where more than a
few employees and passersby could witness their “game,”
Wasik sternly refused. In Wasik’s opinion, in order to make the
mob feel big, he had to choose venues which were small, and easily
overpowered by a few hundred participants. To do otherwise, and set the
mob inside a large, open space, would only serve to highlight its
frailty—its rather small size of participants. Wasik elucidates
on this aspect of the mob in his 2006 coming-out article: “I
never held mobs in the open . . . but this was entirely purposeful on
my part, for like Colin Powell I hewed to the doctrine of overwhelming
force. Only in enclosed spaces could the mob generate the
necessary self-awe; to allow the mob to feel small would have been to
destroy it” (65). Wasik uses Howard Dean’s rapid rise and
decline in popularity during the 2004 election as an example.

Prior to the Iowa caucuses, Dean’s campaign appeared at the
forefront, thanks in part to a virtual community of chat rooms,
bloggers, and other online web supporters. According to Wasik, before
the caucuses, Dean supporters were on the rise, due to the confined
communal nature of Dean’s online virtual community, which led
supporters to believe they were part of Dean’s faceless,
“seemingly numberless throng” (65). However, when a paltry
number of Dean volunteers showed up on-site in Iowa to travel
door-to-door and wrangle support before the caucus, the Dean campaign
allowed itself to feel small and outnumbered, thereby (at least in
Wasik’s opinion) destroying its chances at success. For Wasik,
small, enclosed venues were imperative to the success of the flash mob,
for without such sites participants would not feel part of a powerful,
“hip” game, but rather mere participants of a silly and
unsuccessful prank. As such, Wasik used the scenes (physical sites) of
his flash mobs to create a feeling of scene (in a sociocultural sense)
within his flash mob.

Finally, the flash mob managed to create a scene entirely its own
by employing carnivalesque tactics to dominate and transform physical
space. By employing these tactics and creating a carnival-like
atmosphere of fun and frivolity that simultaneously provided
participants with an opportunity to blow off steam, flash mobs
unknowingly seduced a larger audience, that of the public and world at
large. After all, who doesn’t enjoy a little transgression, a
little reversion, and a little carnival now and then?

Flash mobs share a number of similarities with aspects of carnival
emphasized by Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais
and His World. To begin with, the choice of a public
forum such as a department store or downtown city street, as opposed to
a more traditional theatrical venue, situates the flash mob as “a
play without footlights” (235). One of the foundational aspects
of Bakhtin’s carnival is that it occurs in the
marketplace—the public forum—and thereby erases the usual
boundaries between spectators and participants. As anyone who has
attended a Mardi Gras festival can tell you, no one simply watches a
carnival. Even those who choose not to participate in the throwing and
catching of beads and excessive eating and drinking still participate
in the carnival. This is primarily because carnival time is a specific
sort of time—one which is calendrically regulated and set apart
as distinct. Therefore, even the solitary citizen who does nothing
during carnival season but sit inside his house and peer out the window
at the activities below is a participant, as he is not living life as
usual, but as though on vacation from the normative behaviors and
structures of society. In much the same manner, the flash mob operates
under a distinct set of temporal rules that allow for an inversion of
typical structural patterns.

The strictly regulated ten minute time period of the flash mob
allows the rapid formation of a likeminded mass or mob out of a throng
of distinct, singular identities. During the brief interval in which
the mob swarms a specific site, they are able to disrupt its typical
operating patterns of behavior. An example of this disruption and
inversion can be found in Bill Wasik’s sixth mob in 2003. In Mob
#6, Wasik instructed participants to gather in front of a robotic
dinosaur in the Times Square Toys “R” Us and—on
cue—fall to their knees and cower before the dinosaur for a set
time before leaving. This cowering of the participants took the form of
individuals sitting on their knees, arms extended above their heads and
repetitively bowing to the floor. In the normative, rule-based act of
consumption typical of such a corporate, public space, consumers arrive
at a site (such as Toys “R” Us), peruse the products for
sale, perhaps asking for help, and then carry their chosen purchase to
a cash register where they pay for their goods and exit. Consumers are
not supposed to fall to the floor and raise their arms in adoration or
capitulation to an item on display, such as the robotic dinosaur. When
employees of the Toys “R” Us witnessed this behavior, they
were unsure of how to respond, and although the mob participants were
doing nothing illegal, they quickly called the cops who managed to turn
off the dinosaur just as the mob was dispersing. Other
spectators—such as out of town tourists shopping in the Toys
“R” Us that day—were compelled to stop their normal
behaviors (shopping) and engaged in extraordinary behaviors (such as
taking pictures of the mobbers). In these small ways, both store
employees and random customers were forced to acknowledge an inversion
of structure and react to it, thereby becoming participants in the
carnival-like atmosphere the mob created.

Although flash mobs portray a number of the characteristics of
carnival outlined by Bakhtin—the inversion of hierarchical norms,
an emphasis on the marketplace or public square, the formation of a
large crowd of like-minded individuals, and the display of silly,
somewhat foolish behavior—the flash mob is not a carnival.
Rather, the flash mob should be discussed as a carnivalesque form of
performance, referring to its carnival-like properties, yet
distinguishing between this fractured form of a carnival and the
carnivals of the medieval period to which Bakhtin devotes most of his
attention. Bahktin explains that despite the efforts of bourgeois
culture to stifle carnival and its forms, carnival did not die, rather,
“it was merely narrowed down” (“Rabelais” 276).
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White detail this narrowing down of
carnival as a four-part process in The Politics and Poetics of
Transgression. According to the authors, institutions of
law and order sought to wipe out carnival and festivity from European
life between the 17th and 20th centuries. All sorts of ritualistic and
carnival behaviors came under attack—feasting, fairs,
processions, rowdy spectacles—and were suddenly subject to
strategic forms of surveillance and control via the state. However, the
rising nation states sought to co-opt carnival for their own purposes,
reinventing it as military parades and national holidays.

Other factors, such as the rise of industrialism and the movement
of people from rural country areas to large cities, where squares were
quickly replaced by business districts, also contributed to the
so-called disappearance of carnival. However, as Stallybrass and White
remind us, carnival did not disappear. It managed to be both everywhere
and nowhere at the same time. The first process involved in the breakup
of carnival is fragmentation. Certain elements of carnival began to be
separated from others, in an attempt to maintain a more regulated
control over the participants’ actions. For example, feasting
becomes separated from performance, spectacle from procession, etc.
Simultaneously, carnival became marginalized, both in terms of social
class and geographical location. Until the 19th century, carnival was
something in which all social classes participated, and it was only
with the rise of the bourgeois as a class that carnival became seen as
part of the culture of the Other—the uneducated, unrefined,
improper other of the lower classes. Similarly, carnival, which had
historically run rampant throughout entire towns, began to be pushed
out of wealthy districts and neighborhoods, and eventually out of the
town itself into the countryside or coastal locations.

The third process involved in the narrowing down of carnival is
sublimation. Carnival behaviors involving excess and the grotesque
become sublimated into the private terrors of the isolated bourgeois
individual. In other words, those excessive appetites and grotesque
bodily functions celebrated in carnival—feasting, drinking
heavily, defecation, and waste—become the very things bourgeois
members of society find repulsive and seek to hide from others.
Finally, the behavior of the bourgeois body—particularly the
female body—and not only its desires become controlled during the
fourth part of the process: repression. In carnival, the grotesque body
of the people is articulated as both social pleasure and celebration.
Literally placed outside and apart from the carnival body, the female
bourgeois body which longs to take part in the festivity creates a
pathological phobia of being associated with the carnival body, knowing
that if she were to give into her desires and join in, her status as
different and therefore proper would be lost. This behavior is typical
of the entire bourgeois class of the 19th century, who might allow the
existence of fragmented, marginalized forms of carnival out of
sentimentality for the past, but could never fully engage with it.
Rather, they were forced to remain inside and apart, thereby defining
their status as other and more proper against it.

Flash mobs, then, are a carnivalesque type of performance born from
the fragmentation of carnival. In our post 9/11, terror-filled global
society, one does not come across too many manifestations of the
carnivalesque. As the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests
taught us, crowds are often viewed as threatening, even when their
actions may be non-violent in nature. Furthermore, a seemingly
purposeless gathering of people engaged in silly sorts of actions
stands out in our often humorless society. When faced with a
performance such as the flash mob, one is forced to question what the
purpose or goal of such a carnivalesque form of action might be. An
initial answer lies in the realm of laughter, which Bakhtin reminds us
is liberating in and of itself. Although fragmented and incomplete,
notes written by Bakhtin towards the end of his life seem focused on
the unique and powerful potential of laughter:

Irony (and laughter) as a means for
transcending a situation, rising above it. Only dogmatic and
authoritarian cultures are one-sidedly serious. Violence does not know
laughter. . . . The sense of anonymous threat in the tone of an
announcer who is transmitting important communications. Seriousness
burdens us with hopeless situations, but laughter lifts us above them
and delivers us from them. Laughter does not encumber man, it liberates
him. (“Speech Genres” 134)

If laughter is liberating, then in the case of the flash mob, from
what exactly are both its participants and observers liberated? Clearly
further research into the flash mob’s purpose is required to
answer such questions.

Conclusion

Flash floods, like the flash mob, distinguish themselves by their
rapid appearance, dissemination, and domination/destruction of
low-lying areas. They emerge on the scene without warning and within a
matter of hours change its familiar appearance and function completely.
Usually, after the rain stops falling, the flood disappears or dries
up, often disappearing as quickly as it developed. Flash floods, like
flash mobs, surprise us because they are unexpected, and as such, tend
to leave us at a loss for what to do, other than notify the authorities
of their occurrence.

In the introduction to Perform or Else, Jon McKenzie
locates and describes performance as the “embodied enactment of
cultural forces” (8). Although I disagree with many of
McKenzie’s arguments, I find this definition of performance to be
of use when considering both the scene as well as the purpose of the
flash mob. Like most performances, Wasik’s eight flash mobs, as
well as their subsequent offspring, provide their participants with an
opportunity for the physical expression of cultural fears, desires, and
tensions. Through careful analysis of their various components, we
discover the objects of those fears, desires, and tensions:
surveillance, community, space, and power.

In this article, I outlined the specific attributes of Wasik’s
flash mobs’ agent (the modern hipster), agency (mobile mass
communication), and scene (small, enclosed pseudo-public spaces in New
York City’s post 9/11 society). I also discussed the dominant
nature of the flash mob’s scene as the overarching container of
its agent and agency, as well as the possibility for community building
and communitas existent in the actions of the flash mob.
Keeping these discussions in mind, future investigations of the flash
mob’s purpose should focus not simply on why--but rather, why
this particular type of performance, at this particular time, in these
particular places, through these particular means, and perhaps most
importantly, for this particular audience? Such questions, while
obvious and mundane, serve as signposts leading to the Burkean
scholar’s ultimate goal: discovering what Wasik’s eight
original flash mobs communicate.

Notes

1. A term taken from ancient Greek theater, a skene
is the structure facing the audience forming the background, or
scenery, on which performances occur.
2.
In a 2004 interview with LA Weekly, Wasik
states, “I e-mailed the invitation to myself, then forwarded it
from my own account to about 50 people.”
3.
Others locate the origin of the term in
“hop,” a slang term for opium, placing hip’s origins
within both drug and Eastern culture (Fletcher).
4.
In his first official address to the nation following
the attacks of 9/11, President Bush made a point of encouraging
Americans to continue supporting the economy. Media outlets created a
number of news stories focusing on this admonishment, which I discuss
in detail later in this essay.